Every record but John Coltrane

Sweet Sassafrass! she said to me after we went down the stairs into the bomb shelter.  It was dark and cold and tasted only of leftover moths.  The walls were lined with lead and they made my head ache with mud.  We talked and then she decided that the only thing to do was to leave her behind, so I did.

I checked on her yesterday.  She was doing fine like wine.  Aging much better, though.  She came up to me in the dark and I could tell that she missed me.  She walked much quicker to me than I did to her.  She pulled my collar on my shirt, making it outwardly stiff.  Then we kissed and she remembered that I wasn't a horrible person, but that I needed sometime alone, but I couldn't tell if she realized this, because she kept kissing me.  I wanted to look at her so badly but I knew that kissing with your eyes open is not really kissing at all, so I closed them.  I let her jerk me closer until my chest was filling with air right next to hers.

The next day I was down in the bomb shelter, wishing that she was still there.  I just sat and listened to some old jazz records.  Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonius Monk, but they made my mind wander back to yesterday, so I re-lived it all.  I had forgotten by then that the walls were made of lead and the generator that overtook the record player, except when I laid with my ear right next to it, was humming.  It hummed right along.  I thought maybe it was going to drive itself into the wall, but it didn't so I closed my eyes again.  I thought about her.